Frances Tanzer receives book prize at German studies conference

Frances Tanzer, the Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies and Modern Jewish Culture at Clark University, has received the Radomír Luža Prize for her book, “Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City.” The prize, given by the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance and the German Studies Association, honors outstanding work in the field of Austrian and/or Czechoslovak history in the 20th century. 

The prize is named after Radomír Luža (1922–2009), the first distinguished historian of the Austrian anti-Nazi resistance.

“Vanishing Vienna: Philosemitism, Modernism, and Jews in a Postwar City” examines the fraught process of cultural reconstruction in Vienna from 1938 through the early 1960s. The book’s starting point is the observation of the profound Jewish absence produced by the Holocaust: how does a city reimagine its culture in the relative absence of a once constitutive minority?